October 27, 2011

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This Republican presidential cycle has been a serial vindication of the widely-held insider expectations about politics: That hard work and organization matter; that early polling, and particularly early national polling doesn't; and that there's no unconventional path to the nomination.

The last unconventional candidate understood this: Barack Obama hired a bunch of seasoned hacks and worked Iowa like he was Dick Gephardt. This year's would-be unconventional candidates have not. Sarah Palin tried to build a national base without working very hard, through social media and well-timed public statements. She saw her approval ratings destroyed and her party walk away from her. By the time she announced she wasn't running, it didn't matter. Michelle Bachmann thrived when she took a traditional path, sweating it in Iowa through Ames, playing for the state's church-based social conservatives. Then she tried to play the celebrity and run a very different kind of race, and collapsed, in part through her own fault and in part because her resume was genuinely too thin. A run of serious Republican figures -- Chris Christie and Paul Ryan among them -- took a hard look at getting in late and decided they couldn't handle the logistics and personal challenges. Rick Perry did get in late, and is paying a huge price for a lack of preparation and organization that wasn't visible in the early polling or early buzz. Donald Trump -- well, never mind.

Nate Silver has been always been a champion of political tangibles, and particularly of polling, on the quite reasonable theory that much of the speculation and commentary is pure garbage. He writes today:

The fact that Mr. Cain has made it this far with such apparently weak fundamentals — we’re less than 10 weeks away from the Iowa caucuses — is itself remarkable. It implies that there is either something fundamentally unusual about this year’s Republican nomination process, or perhaps that some sort of “new normal” has been established and that the old rules of how you win a nomination no longer carry as much weight.

Could be. But the litany of losers above suggests to me that the laws of gravity still apply, whatever the national polls say, and that the Republican Party isn't going to nomiate the short-staffed former pizza executive and motivational speaker presently touring Alabama.

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